1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a bowel sound analysis method and system, and more particularly to a bowel sound analysis method and system that removes, by using higher-order statistics (HOS), noise from a continuously collected bowel sound signal, then captures a high-complexity feature by using a fractal dimension algorithm to obtain an intestinal motility signal to determine a time point when intestinal motility occurs, and may further analyze a feature of the intestinal motility signal to determine a health condition of an intestinal tract.
2. Related Art
According to the statistics data of Ministry of Health and Welfare of ROC in 2012, malignant neoplasm (cancer) was still listed first among the top ten leading causes of death. On average, one person died of cancer every twelve minutes and two seconds, and colorectal cancer still ranked third among the top ten cancers. Motility diseases caused by gastrointestinal problems are common internal and surgical diseases. One of the most common gastrointestinal motility disorders, Ileus, can occur following cancer surgery and laparoscopic surgery, appear with infections, abdominal inflammation, endocrine diseases, or present as drug side effects.
The use of gastroscopy and computed tomography may assist a physician to observe organs directly; however, the practicability of gastroscopy and computed tomography are actually limited by some constraints. For example, computed tomography instruments are very expensive, gastroscopy requires direct entry into intestines and easily causes discomfort during examination, and both computed tomography and gastroscopy require professional training of operations and high demands for medical labor. Computed tomography and gastroscopy are also unsuitable for long-term monitoring and measurement on a patient.
Therefore, a clinically common diagnosis manner is to observe a condition of intestinal motility by using a nonintrusive stethoscope, and a health condition of a gastrointestinal tract of a patient is diagnosed based on the amplitude, frequency, and period of bowel sound. However, the use of a conventional stethoscope to observe a condition of intestinal motility must rely on a physician with rich clinical experience, and the quality of stethoscopy is affected by training and experience of an examiner, environment, and abdominal condition changes, and objective evaluation such as quantization of intestinal motility conditions of a patient cannot be easily performed. Therefore, it becomes a topic of concern at present how to achieve the most effective and accurate application for evaluation and diagnosis of bowel sound.